Fairy Dust
by The Jabberer
Summary: He's an angel, and she's nothing but a wannabe fairy. Of graffiti, emotions, and maybe even of growing up. Maybe. — Friendship!FujiOC
1. Chapter 1

**TITLE: **Fairy Dust  
><strong>FANDOM:<strong> The Prince of Tennis  
><strong>PAIRING: <strong>Friendship!FujiOC  
><strong>SUMMARY:<strong> She's a flower that's surrounded by so many nettles and looks like a weed. This doesn't seem to deter Fuji, cactus-collector extraordinaire.  
><strong>DISCLAIMER:<strong> I don't own Prince of Tennis.

.

_Scrape. Scrape. Scrape._

"Whatcha doin', girlie?"

Amaya squinted up, and raised a grubby arm to shield the sun. "Drawin', mister."

"You're pretty good there, squirt. Did anyone ever tell you that?"

The little girl went back to rubbing her piece of chalk on the blacktop. "Yeah. I've heard it before. And I heard that if a stranger ever talks to me, I have to kick him _here_," she got up, and swiftly and unmercifully kicked the well-meaning man between the legs.

She dropped the chalk back in her basket with a _plink_, and walked off.

The man groaned. "Damn New Yorkers. We're getting too tough for our own good."

.

"What are you doing?"

Amaya looked up. "I'm drawing, Auntie."

Her aunt frowned. "Amaya, you know I love you, but I will _not_ let a fourteen-year-old girl draw some stuff on my driveway. What are you drawing, anyway? It looks like a crime scene."

She wasn't far off, with the outline of a figure drawn on the black pavement.

Amaya shrugged. "Just… stuff. That was just a basic gesture drawing."

There was a sigh. "It's supposed to rain in a few minutes, so go inside. We'll let it wash my driveway, and look online for any parks with huge blacktops for you to draw on, okay?"

She smiled wryly. "Thanks, Auntie."

.

She hated school so much.

God, why couldn't it just _end_?

Japanese literature full of impossible metaphors and random symbolism, equations to find stupid things like the circumference of a circle, having to read children's books like _Good Night, Moon_ in English class, when she'd had them read to her years ago.

Those were what she hated the most. She didn't mind science, because the way chemicals reacted were actually pretty cool, and the history textbooks had famous paintings to look at.

But every day, Amaya would stare out the window, looking at the blue of the sky and the green of the grass, and imagine what color the two would make if they were mixed together.

Her grades were horrendous, and she didn't care, and Auntie was too busy to ask for her report cards or about her school ranking.

But she hated the art program more than anything.

Sketching things to be perfect images, stroking oil paints on a canvas, swishing around water colors, carefully molding clay… They copied works to work on their technique, day in and day out.

What good was technique when you didn't have the creativity to apply it to?

Sometimes the copies were a little different. Instead of a man, it'd be a woman. Instead of a swan on the lake, it'd be a boat. Sometimes the sky would be clouds instead of sun.

But it was the same basic framework, and the same routine every day, and _God_ she just wanted to quit the class.

She didn't, though. She could filch off some moleskin or charcoal to doodle with, or some pastels if she needed them.

Amaya hated Seigaku in general. It was quiet during class, except for the sound of the teacher's voice, and lead and rubber eraser rubbing against paper, and the flipping of notebooks. There were no rowdy bouts of laughing or crude comments, or even the basic snicker of gossip.

The kids in Japan were so goody-goody it was pathetic.

.

"_I got a present for you, babe."_

_A dress. It was pink and frills and poof. It was made of cheap satin and fake tulle, and rhinestones and glitter were scattered around so the effect was blinding._

_She loved it._

"_It's for Halloween. You can be a princess."_

_She put it on. _

"_Aren't I pretty, Daddy?"_

_Daddy got a plastic crown and fastened it to her head. "You're perfect, princess."_

"_Daddy…"_

"_Yeah?"_

"_I wanna be a fairy."_

_He stared at her, hard. _

"_There's a friend of mine who works at that sewing factory. I'll sketch up some wings, and he'll make it for you, okay?"_

"_Daddy, I wanna be a fairy."_

_._

Amaya remembered every morning when she looked in the mirror.

It wasn't true. She didn't want to be a fairy.

She wanted to be like Daddy.

He looked fairy-like, but she never told him because he'd deny it. But he did. His hair had been a wispy blonde, and his pale blue eyes always looked cloudy and misted, and he was so thin, like they were in the pictures.

And, God, his _art_…

He'd gone to extremes. He did crack and weed and fairy dust. He'd drink alcohol. He wouldn't eat. But his art was pure and raw emotion, and it could choke up just about anyone.

She wanted to be that good, someday.

.

Amaya decided the person in front of her was a weirdo.

He was incredibly pretty in a feminine sort of way, which wasn't what bothered Amaya, since she'd seen all sorts of things in New York. No, he was always smiling, and his eyes were always _closed_.

His name was Fuji. The hyper kid with the cool red hair always called him that, but then again, he also talked about someone called _Ochibi_, which could never be someone's name.

.

The girl who sat behind him was very artistic.

Her grades didn't seem to be very good, but he'd see doodles or thumbnail sketches in the margins of her homework.

They changed every day. Sometimes she'd draw something that shows so much talent it almost made him breathless. It would be like looking at a tiny photograph. Other times, she'd draw strange shapes and blobs that he couldn't make out.

There were rumors about her.

She was a halfie. Her mother was supposed to be Japanese, and her father was supposed to be American. She supposedly was involved in gangs back in America, which was why she was sent to live with her aunt in Japan.

Fuji doubted this. She was too skinny to be involved in a gang. He could see the bones and muscles of her hands working whenever she reached out to grasp the papers he was passing back to her, and the jutting bones of her wrists and cheeks.

It was unnatural.

.

Some members of the tennis team were going to the park to fool around at the street courts. Fuji chuckled as he watched Eiji and Momoshiro simultaneously pinch Ryoma's cheeks.

A crowd was gathering around nearby, and as eye-catching as the Seigaku regulars were, Fuji could see that they, for once, were not the spectacle to see.

They made their way through the crowd to see what was going on.

A boy was hopping up and down excitedly, screaming, _"This is the coolest one yet!"_

Fuji could see Eiji fall silent, and Oishi's jaw drop.

He could see why.

There was a birds-eye view of a grassy cliff that jutted out over angry, tumbling waves. A stick-skinny girl in too-long, once-white, button-up shirt was standing on the water, scrutinizing the blades of grass, brandishing a piece of green chalk.

"Why is there a cliff in the middle of the park?" Momoshiro muttered, rubbing his eyes. "How is that girl standing on the side of the cliff without falling?"

The girl threw the chalk into a nearby basket, and pulled a deep blue one out of the breast pocket of her shirt. She leaned over to add something onto the waves, and the hem of her shirt rode up her legs.

"Is she even wearing _pants_?"

Oishi nudged Momoshiro, instantly shushing him.

"Hey, Fuji, isn't that the girl who sits behind us?"

Fuji looked at the girl, and was surprised to find that her face was familiar. "Yes, it is."

Eiji wasted no time in shoving his way through the crowd. "Amaya-chan! Oy, Amaya-chan!"

Amaya turned around, surprise etched all over her face.

Eiji bounced forward. "I didn't know you could draw!"

She narrowed her eyes at his feet. "Step back. You're about to smudge the waves."

He looked surprised to be answered with such hostility, but he plowed on through anyway. "Sorry about that, Amaya-chan!"

Her normally large eyes (Fuji supposed she inherited them from her Caucasian parent) were slits. "Who said you could call me by my first name?"

"…Sorry? I just call everyone –"

Amaya cut him off when her upper lip curled into a condescending sneer. "What did you want?"

Eiji, whose confidence had been plummeting, perked up again. "I just wanted to say your picture's really cool."

She raised an eyebrow. "Really?"

He beamed and nodded. "Yeah! It's just like a real cliff!"

This comment made her frown thoughtfully. "Hm… Is that so…"

She reached for a bucket of water, and dumped its contents all over the drawing with a swing of her arm.

Eiji's expression of pure shock froze the moment. Water droplets hung in the air like crystal, reflecting beams of light and casting flecks of rainbows everywhere.

They shattered on the ground with a _splash_, just barely missing Eiji's shoes.

The water began to run downhill, and blue suddenly smeared with green. Fuji could see that she'd used yellow in the grass, and purple in the water.

She thrust the now-empty bucket to the boy who had been bouncing up and down earlier. "Hey, kid. I'll show you how to draw that cool design you liked if you do me a favor and fill this up at the fountain."

The boy eagerly nodded and bounded off, and the crowd, seeing that the subject of their interest had been washed away, slowly began to disappear.

Momoshiro, having recovered from his shock, began muttering something darkly under his breath about manners before turning around and heading off towards the tennis courts.

Eiji stepped back, stunned into speechlessness, and slowly swiveled on the heel of his foot before walking after Momoshiro.

The others began to do the same, and when Fuji looked back, he saw her standing on the blacktop in her oversized shirt, her bare feet being covered in the liquefied chalk.

Her legs looked like twigs.

.

The kid was back, lugging the bucket behind him, a banana-shaped grin on his face.

Amaya could see that he had cavities forming on his molars.

"Thanks, kid."

Half of the chalk had rubbed out, and she'd picked a spot that was close to the drainage pipe. She estimated that she'd need about two more buckets of water to clean it up.

"Hey, Smith?"

The kid couldn't pronounce "Smith" correctly, making it sound more like "smit", but he tried, and Amaya appreciated the fact that the kid didn't give up common courtesy for the sake of correct pronunciation.

"What?"

He stepped back as she flung the water over her drawing. "Why'dja get rid of it after the guy said it looked like a real cliff? Do you hate him or something?"

She snapped the gum she had been chewing, watching as the layer of chalk ran down with the water. "Nah. He's okay when he's not about to smudge my work."

She walked over to her bag to get some paper towels for her feet. "Lemme tell you something, kid. The first thing that people notice in art is either the biggest thing, or the most important thing. Got it?"

He nodded eagerly, but Amaya could tell that he just wanted her to show him how to draw the flame design on his hat.

"But when you're an artist, you want people to see the most important thing. The most important thing in that picture was supposed to be the waves, but the guy noticed the cliff first. So that drawing was a fail."

She threw a piece of red chalk at him. "Now gimme your hat. I'll show you how to draw that flame."

.

That night, Amaya weighed herself on the scale.

It read forty kilos.

She quickly converted that to pounds in her head. She was good at math when it mattered.

She was five foot seven.

She weighed ninety pounds.

She looked at her hand and wrapped it around her upper arm.

It fit around the limb snugly, and she cursed.

'_Not yet, not yet…'_

She looked at her legs. The skin was like tracing paper, and she could trace the web of her veins if she wanted to.

She smushed the flesh her calf, and she could feel her fingers sink into the fat.

A hairbrush went flying into the wall.

She wasn't fairy thin yet.

'_Not yet, not yet…'_

__.

"_Aren't I pretty, Daddy?"_

"_You're perfect, princess."_


	2. Chapter 2

**TITLE: **Fairy Dust  
><strong>FANDOM:<strong> The Prince of Tennis  
><strong>PAIRING: <strong>Friendship!FujiOC  
><strong>SUMMARY:<strong> She's a flower that's surrounded by so many nettles and looks like a weed. This doesn't seem to deter Fuji, cactus-collector extraordinaire.  
><strong>DISCLAIMER:<strong> I don't own Prince of Tennis.  
><strong>NOTE:<strong> When Amaya and her dad are speaking English (which is whenever they appear together), they are speaking it with a Brooklyn accent. Look it up if you don't know what it sounds like.

.

Her days started off with curses because the alarm is too fucking _loud_, and should really just _shut the hell up_.

This day was just like any other, and the first thing Amaya said when she opened her mouth is a string of words that would make Auntie cringe if she heard them.

But this day was still sort of different. It was one of her designated skip days, which meant she could go back to sleep if she really wanted to.

Amaya wanted to, but when she was lying there on her back, her hair splayed across the pillow and catching the glint of the morning sun like melted chocolate, she just took a deep breath. She felt _full_, which was really strange, because she'd skipped dinner again last night, and she figured it was because her mouth was open, catching gulps of sunlight and dust.

Her head was a lull, and she couldn't tell if it was because she had just woken up or if it was because of the air filling up her stomach.

Her eyes closed.

Her mouth closed.

.

_She was sitting on Daddy's lap. He was fiddling with strands of her hair, weaving them together in something that resembled a braid, but looked more like something a mermaid would wear than a human being._

"_You've got pretty hair, babe," he'd say. "Your mom would dye it this color. She dyed it so much, I think it got into her DNA and passed onto you."_

_She didn't know what DNA meant, but she understood what he was saying anyway._

"_You've got my eyes, though," he'd say, his tone full of something bittersweet that sounded a bit like regret. "Teardrop eyes."_

"_Teardrop eyes?"_

"_Yeah, babe."_

_The sun glinted off the mirror, and the ray of light reflected into his eyes, blinding him._

_The light stung, but the sting felt sweet. It was like eating sour candy with a burnt tongue._

"_Teardrop eyes, baby. Remember that."_

"_Remember that."_

.

Amaya snapped her eyes open and shot out of bed, heading for a mirror.

"Teardrop eyes, huh, Daddy?"

She stood a good three inches away from the mirror, and her fingers touched the smooth glass.

She briefly wished it were water. If it were water, the surface would ripple into rings of infinity, and that was what she wanted to do. Make ripple rings of infinity, because that would mean that she'd have done something that affected the world forever.

Her eyes were glassy. They were colorless, but they weren't gray, either. They were the color of tears—the salty ones that stung your face and seeped into your mouth, filling it with resentment. They'd catch the light and glisten halfheartedly like murky ponds.

(She always had to work on her glares. She always looked like she was crying, and she had to be tough to make it to anything in this world.)

Her finger traveled up the mirror until it kissed the reflection of her eyelash. It left a path of grease.

But she liked her eyelashes. They were long and dark, and her eyes looked even bigger.

She flicked her teardrop eyes to the reflection of her eyebrows. She hated them. She had to spend so much time on them. They were bushy, so she'd pluck them until they were translucent.

It wasn't fairy-like to have gorilla eyebrows.

Her face was alright, though. She'd gotten her mom's cheekbones, and Daddy's nose, and her Nanna's chin, and Auntie's forehead. Her bone structure would've been as delicate as petals if her face weren't skeleton-thin.

The skin was pale even though she spent so much time in the sun. Amaya figured that the sun's nutrients would fill her stomach instead of darken in her skin.

A ray of sunlight hit the back of her head, and she glowed angel-bright.

She laughed at the irony.

Hard.

.

There was a _scrape_ and a _clink_, and Amaya stepped back to look at what was supposed to be her masterpiece.

She frowned.

The colors were more intense than neon, and the contours were dead-on, but it looked like a drawing.

She wanted it to look like life.

"What are you doing here, young lady?"

Amaya whirled around like a hurricane.

Instead of a tubby gingerbread policeman, there was the lithe form of Auntie.

"Oh, shit."

.

They sat on the bench with two cans of soda. Auntie was fiddling with the gold ring she always wore on her thumb.

"Listen, Amaya. I know I'm not your mom, and that I'll never really be there for you every time you need me, so I'm only going to say this once."

She paused, as if unsure what to say, and Amaya stared at her.

"Look… I know you don't really remember your mom, but she was my sister. My perfect big sister." Something ugly crossed her face, and Amaya was startled. She'd never seen Auntie with an expression like that before.

"I love her, but sometimes it's infuriating. She had it all. Looks come with anyone in our family, but your mom had brains to match. Did you know she graduated at the top of her class? God, Mom and Dad would always compare the two of us. Everyone did."

Auntie took a swig from the can, and if Amaya didn't know better, she'd have thought that Auntie was downing beer instead of soda.

"She was supposed to do something great, y'know? She was supposed to go and save the world or something. But then she met your dad. You know people in Japan, a lot of us don't really like foreigners, and the fact that he was a high-school dropout made it even worse. So when your parents got married, Mom and Dad never spoke to her again."

Amaya looked at the nutrition facts on the soda can, and grimaced at all the calories.

"So what're you saying?"

Auntie looked at her, but her eyes seemed to look right through her. "You've got some of your dad's qualities, honey. But at least you've got your mom's head. Use it."

Amaya had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, but Auntie looked more like a zombie, and she thought she could come to love Auntie, so she tried to bring life into her again.

"I'll see what I can do."

.

After Auntie left (she hadn't thought enough to send her niece off to school), Amaya went right back to bending over the ground, skimming her knees on the blacktop as she moved the chalk back and forth, back and forth.

_Scrape. Scrape. Scrape._

She'd made two more drawings, but she hated them. They were just pictures.

"God," she murmured, leaning back and shielding her eyes from the sun. "How did Daddy do it?"

.

_There was a mural on the wall of the building. It was African-Americans in the Roaring Twenties, when jazz had taken over and the Negro was in vogue. There were couples swinging each other around wildly to upbeat musicians, and Amaya could see the glints of joy in their eyes and the flash of their laughing teeth. She could hear the music._

.

She fumbled around the pockets of her shorts, and pulled out a box of cigarettes. She took one out and flicked the switch on her lighter.

A tiny flame sputtered out, and the end of the cigarette glowed red.

Amaya took a breath of the tobacco ash and tasted the bitter ashes of sin on her lips.

"How did Daddy do it?"

She took another breath, and tried to remember.

.

_Amaya was coughing. Daddy crushed the butt of his cigarette on the ashtray and turned back to the outline of his next mural._

"_Sorry, babe. But the smoke helps me think."_

_She learned to get used to the smoke over the years, as Daddy started buying more packs of cigarettes a day. _

_And then Daddy started to smell like the smoke._

_She learned to love the smell._

.

For a second, Japan smelled like Daddy.

Amaya closed her eyes, and the sounds of Tokyo traffic melted into a breathy tenor.

.

"_You don't think about making masterpieces. You just feel."_

"_But won't you draw bad if you don't think about the.. the…" Amaya scrunched her face. "The tech-nick? That's what the art teacher at school says."_

_Daddy laughed. "I'll tell you a secret, babe."_

_She leaned in, greedily sucking in the air between them._

_He bent forward to put his lips near her ear. _

"_Art isn't about technique. If you can make someone feel enough, they won't even pay attention to the way you made the work."_

"_So does that mean I don't have to work on sketching this pot?"_

_He laughed again. "Nice try, kiddo. Remember what I said knowing the rules if you want to break them."_

.

She ended up going home after drawing three more failures.

She wanted to break glass. She wanted to see the spectrums that they would reflect when the glinted in the light, and feel the sting her eyes would get when they beamed sunlight into her face.

The imaginary _smash_ was ringing through her head as she made her way down Auntie's driveway.

"Hello."

Amaya blinked.

Standing on Auntie's doorstep was the pretty person who sat in front of her.

He didn't look like a fairy, but an angel was pretty damn close.

The sun highlighted the bridge of his nose and the tops of his cheeks. His hair glinted in the sun, and his lips were carved into a delicate smile. There was something strange about his muscles–while they weren't tense, they weren't completely relaxed, either. It seemed as if he was in a fixed sort of ease.

He opened his mouth to speak, but Amaya held up a hand to stop him.

"Stay like that," she said in her broken, American accent. "I have to draw you."

She reached for the tiny sketchbook and charcoal pencils she carried in her bag.

It was a quick, thumbnail sketch, but it was the best thing she had drawn in a while. An angel. A real _angel_.

Daddy would have loved him, she decided, while she drew in the quick curves of his eyes. He would have loved the way this boy resonated a peacefulness and calm. He would have loved the fact that this boy looked deceptively weak. This boy was slender, thin, but a trained eye could see the muscles that were ready to tense under the delicate skin. The light was hitting this boy in just the right way, and Amaya forgot the soreness she had in her ankles, or the swelling of her toes. She could only feel the beams of light reflecting off of this boy, and the white angel wings that were but weren't protruding from the boy's shoulder blades, and that peace.

She was done the sketch in three minutes, and she held it out for him.

The angel boy scrutinized the drawing, and he seemed somewhat impressed, because he said three words:

"It's very good."

Amaya looked back at the drawing, and she decided that it _was_ very good. She'd captured that peaceful aura and fixed ease of his, and that light that reflected off of him in beams and made him glow.

She almost smiled, holding the sketch up to compare it to the real thing.

"It is, isn't it?"

The angel glow that emanated from this boy disappeared when he held up a stack of papers. "Today's homework. I told the teacher I'd get it to you."

Amaya gave it a disgusted look. "Just throw it out. I never bother to do it, anyway."

She expected him to look disappointed, this angel boy with but without angel's wings, but he just shrugged.

So she realized that he didn't come here to give her the homework.

"How'd you know where I live?"

"The directory," he said, angelically.

"Why'd you come?"

The smile started to fade, and Amaya knew that he must have come to reprimand her for one of the many, many sins in her life, because angels only got mad in front of sinners.

"Yesterday. My friend commented on your drawing at the park, and you just erased it. Why?"

She pressed her lips together. This boy wouldn't understand.

"Do you have a problem with Eiji?"

"Is that what his name is?"

"Yes."

"Well, I don't have a problem with him. So you can just go."

But he didn't leave. He continued to stand there and ask her questions.

"Then why did you erase the drawing?"

Amaya crossed her arms.

"Because that drawing was a fail."

"And you decided that right after he commented on it?"

"Yes."

And then Amaya didn't want to talk anymore, because this angel boy would never understand anything about her. When it was obvious that this boy wouldn't move until he got a clear answer, she went around the back and walked in through the back door.

The boy left, but he left the homework on the doorstep.

Amaya doodled on it, and when the teacher asked it for her the next day, she put on an innocent expression, saying, "I never got it, sir. Maybe the person you sent it with got lost."


	3. Chapter 3

**TITLE: **Fairy Dust  
><strong>FANDOM:<strong> The Prince of Tennis  
><strong>PAIRING: <strong>Friendship!FujiOC  
><strong>SUMMARY:<strong> She's a flower that's surrounded by so many nettles and looks like a weed. This doesn't seem to deter Fuji, cactus-collector extraordinaire.  
><strong>DISCLAIMER:<strong> I don't own Prince of Tennis.  
><strong>NOTE:<strong> Long overdue and extremely short, to boot. But very necessary transition.

.

Fuji stared at the girl who sat behind him as she walked into class.

The most notable thing was her skinniness. He could see the bones in her kneecaps and the muscles and tendons of her face. There was no delicate softness to this girl. She was all sharp lines and jutting angles and hollow contours. If she had been of normal weight, the most notable thing would have been her eyes. They were a pale watery-blue. His own eyes were more intense in color, but hers looked as if they were made of glass. They looked as if they would shatter if she were to burst into tears. And when she had first walked through the door two months ago, he really had thought that she was about to cry until she gave the class a steady once-over before snorting in something akin to disgust.

This girl could never have been involved in a gang. She would have been broken in seconds.

He wondered, briefly, how the rumors could have possibly began to circulate, and how people could have believed them, because the idea was so far-fetched he would have laughed if it were about anyone else.

Her hair brushed by his desk as she walked by. It was limp and thin. It lacked luster and life.

He heard the teacher ask her for her homework, and her deceptively innocent reply.

The teacher pursed his lips and turned to Fuji.

Fuji's lips curled into his usual smile. "I apologize, sir, but I wasn't able to find her house."

Because, after all, he could appreciate deception (even pooly-played) when he was in a pitying mood.

The teacher gave him an understanding nod and walked back to the front of the classroom.

The girl leaned forward and snorted in his ear. "What was that all about?"

She didn't smell floral or fruity. She stank of cigarette ash.

But Fuji liked the distinct musky smell of fire, so he just answered back naturally.

"Just helping out a fellow classmate."

She stared at him suspiciously, but the bell rang before she could say anything.

.

She always left at lunch.

No one knew where she went, but it was just part of the legend surrounding her.

"_Do you think she goes to meet her gang?"_

Eiji frowned when he heard this.

Fuji was mildly surprised. His friend was never quite the type to hold a grudge, but Fuji hadn't thought he'd be so concerned about her. "What is it?"

Eiji shrugged. "Nothing. It just seems stupid to talk about someone who can't defend herself, you know?"

.

There was a tiny Oriental medicine shop that was a two-minute walk from Seigaku, if one were to cut across the tennis courts and the nearby trees. The owner had been a friend of her father's–which was strange, because her mother had been the one who lived at Japan, but they'd apparently met at an art camp one year in high school and never lost touch.

Amaya pushed open the door, secretly delighting in the sound of the wind chimes that alerted the owner of a customer's presence.

"Hey, Nakano-jii."

"Nakano-jii", as she liked to call him, was a man who always smelled of tobacco. He wore a _yakuza_–styled kimono, which he swore helped him deal with unruly teenagers or suspicious-looking men.

He looked up from the dried herbs that he was crushing. "Skipping class again, Amaya?"

She smirked as she inhaled the scent of Oriental herbs and roots. "Just lunch. I have to pass this semester to get out of school during break."

Nakano chuckled under his breath. "What would your father say if he knew you skipped class?"

"I told him a while ago. He just asked what I'd been drawing lately."

"Of course."

Amaya swung herself onto the countertop, swinging her feet back and forth against the wood. "So what kind of tea did you make this time?"

He rolled his eyes. "None for you. You always spit it out and start cursing about the taste."

"But I drink the rest, don't I?"

"No."

She laughed again, and the pressure made her ribs hurt.

Nakano stared at her. "How much weight did you lose this week?"

Amaya grimaced. "None."

"Good."

.

**TRANSLATION NOTE:** I mentioned earlier that Nakano always wears a yakuza-styled kimono. By this, I mean a kimono for men with designs. Men typically wear plain kimonos without any designs, while members of the yakuza (or gang) like to wear kimonos with designs. (This always makes my mom and I giggle when we see a non-Japanese man try to absorb the culture by wearing a patterned kimono at the Washington D.C. cherry blossom viewings since, well, they typically think the patterned ones symbolize wealth and all that, but yeah.)


	4. Chapter 4

**ENTITLED:** Fairy Dust  
><strong>FANDOM:<strong> Prince of Tennis  
><strong>PAIRING:<strong> friendship!FujiOC  
><strong>SUMMARY: <strong>He's an angel, and she's nothing but a wannabe fairy. Of graffiti, emotions, and maybe even of growing up. Maybe.**  
>DISCLAIMER:<strong> I don't own Prince of Tennis.  
><strong>NOTE:<strong> It's been forever and a half, I know. This will be finished–just very sporadically. And badly.

.

Amaya hated All Things Sports, but there was something about tennis that seemed to bring her back to New York.

It was probably because Daddy would take her to the US Open every once in a while, if his paintings had been selling well. He'd wake her up early, and they'd take the subway down to Flushing. She remembered being cranky the first time they'd gone, but then Daddy had pulled her up in her lap and told her about how Mama had been a star tennis player back in high school.

"_She was amazing, baby."_

"_Did you see her play?"_

"_No. But your mom was always amazing at everything she did."_

So when they started tennis in phys. ed., Amaya found herself not minding as much.

The class sucked at it, though. She'd seen the greats: Henin, Sharapova, Federer, Nadal, the Williams Sisters. There was no way she'd be impressed by what these people could do.

Amaya herself wasn't too shabby. She knew the basic forms that the teacher was explaining–she'd sketched the pros when she'd seen them play, and she knew where to place her fingers and how high her follow-through had to be.

But the racket was heavier than it looked, and it hurt her joints to have to hit the ball with it, especially her wrists.

She was in the middle of a comfortable, slow-paced rally when the angel boy caught her eye.

He was playing against the boy with cool red hair.

They both moved so _differently_ than the rest of the class. Even some of the more athletic boys fumbled a bit with their tennis rackets, but they moved with a sort of grace and confidence that seemed to tell the world, _we know what we're doing_.

The boy with the cool red hair hit the ball to the left corner.

The angel boy sliced it into the right side of the court.

And then the redhead _flipped in the air_ and hit it–where, Amaya didn't know, because the girl she was playing against had hit the ball in her direction again.

But she wished she could draw this.

.

"So you play tennis, huh?"

Fuji looked at the girl behind him in surprise. The entire school seemed to know about the tennis team now that it had gotten so far in the tournament.

But the girl behind him looked at him impatiently, so he ignored her ignorance.

"Yes, I do."

"Hmph," was her response, but the way she was looking at him was calculating rather than disapproving.

She'd looked the same way when she'd asked to draw him earlier.

Ah, so that was it.

His trademark smile widened. "Would you like to draw us sometime?"

Amaya wanted to say yes, but something was clogging up the back of her throat and weighing down her tongue.

It was pride, a _stupid_ pride, and she knew it, and _he_ knew it, but it was suffocating her.

"I don't know. We'll see."

.

She was called into the principal's office that day.

The principal was a man nearing his sixties. His face was covered in laugh lines, and there were some friendly-looking crows feet protruding from the corners of his eyes.

"Hello, Smith-kun. Take a seat."

She managed to remember to bow–a clumsy, awkward little bend of her back–before she did. The chair was a stiff little thing, and it was cold.

The principal smiled at her. It was genuine, which she liked. His eyes were warm.

"Students in Japan normally are expected to work on academics on their own, so I normally don't take interest in these cases, but I remember your mother very well–"

"My mother went here?"

This was new.

"Huh," she said, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "No wonder Daddy wanted me to come here."

Amaya had said _"Daddy"_ in English, but the principal raised no eyebrow.

"Is everything alright?" he asked. "I normally tell homeroom teachers to deal with situations like this, but you are a special case. I was your mother's homeroom teacher."

Any ounce of respect she had for the man sapped away. "Fine," she snapped. "Just peachy."

His smile was still warm. Amaya wondered why.

"I can only imagine how hard your situation must be."

She wanted to rip his smile off his face.

"Perhaps a hobby would help you adjust."

She shrugged.

The principal leaned back in his chair thoughtfully. "What do you like to do, Smith-kun?"

Amaya looked down–and noticed that she'd drawn a bird on her leg.

"Smith-kun?"

She looked up, feeling the frown curl down the corners of her face when–

'_Shit.'_

His eyes were so raw that they melted back into the little girl toddling after her father in the streets of New York.

Her eyes smoothed over. The left side of her mouth tilted up. She could feel her shoulders curling into herself, and her chin drooping towards her collarbone.

Amaya wanted to curse him, because _she wasn't a damn flower bud_.

"Smith-kun?"

"Art," she found herself saying.

He hummed thoughtfully. "If the drawing of that butterfly on your hand is any indication, it seems you're quite talented."

She could picture her cheeks being painted red.

"It's just a doodle from class."

The warm eyes twinkled. "What if I offered you a deal, Smith-kun?"

Amaya straightened her shoulders and sharpened her eyes. "Hit."

"The boys' tennis team is doing remarkably well this year. We normally take photographs of the teams at the end of each season, but I think an exception can be made in this case."

He looked at her again, and Amaya scrunched her face together in confusion.

"Judging from your scores, you can pass each class if you get an eighty percent on your next assignments. If you continue to maintain a passing average, I will allow you to draw a portrait of each member."

The words themselves were enough, but the knowing smile and the eager warmth he seemed to radiate did it.

"Okay."

She was in.


End file.
